Quote from: Catelf;582095So in a way, i agree with TristramEvans, but i also severely disagree with him on what is and should be defined as "superior".

I don't know that I mentioned any games I thought were superior , except in relation to games that are markedly awful.

I don't really have an opinion on the d20 system, other than it's not something I personally ever wanted to use. I just don't like the arbitrariness of the rules/levels stuff, and feats make me go flaccid. But that's all personal taste, I'm not going to claim d20 isn't a solid, workable system that many people enjoyed.

OTOH, I think there was ALOT of crap produced for the d20 system.

Quote from: StormBringer;582189You can consider that more probable all you want.

Clearly, you are not familiar with game designers.

I will give you three:  d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu, and d20 Future.  None of these were written by light-weights or fly-by-night companies, and none of them are exactly flying off the shelves.  And I highly doubt people decided they sucked ahead of time; they got pretty good reviews all around.

Clearly, you consider me lightweight, and you may consider that all you want.
You did manage to misunderstand what i asked for.
But before i rephrase my question: It has already been concluded that setting trumps system earlier in this thread, and neither D20 Modern or D20 Future seems to have very much of notable settings ... i may be wrong, i do not own any of them ...
Also, why play D20 Cthulhu, if you already have CoC?

Now to my rephrasing:
Give me one example on how D20, in its system itself*, would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.
(* How would the D20 Rules mess up the attempts to make horror sci-fi, or anything such?)

Ok, you may continue to think that i don't know much, and you are partially correct, but i have looked through several rpgs in my attempt to make my own, and i know several variants of systems even if i don't know their makers.
(I own most of those i have looked through, too, but that is not very important, or it shouldn't be.)
My reasoning may be simple, but it is still my reasoning:
Tri-stat, Basic Roleplay, and Storytelling System can all be used for several very different genres and settings, so why would D20 be exluded from it?
I have at least one game that is D20 or a variant of it, and i find no hindances in the rules as to that it cannot be used for sci-fi or horror.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582225I don't know that I mentioned any games I thought were superior , except in relation to games that are markedly awful.

.... Who was it that started the comparison to "The Masters" in art, then?

Quote from: Catelf;582230.... Who was it that started the comparison to "The Masters" in art, then?

I didn't name any game as a comparison to a master. I think the hobby needs a few hundred years before any such claim could be made. We're still in the stone age, if we're going to stretch this metaphor razor-thin. Actually, I don't think the metaphor extends as far as "masters", because RPGs are not art. The point was obviously about degrees of objective and subjective criticism, not claiming that a Davinci of RPGs exists.

Quote from: StormBringer;582083I think in many ways, the latter product incrementally moving things forward is often better than a quantum leap.  Which isn't to say the massive leap is bad, but I think a lot of bad design comes out of aiming for that as a goal, instead of a solid game that can be later improved upon.

Defining any part of the process or implementation as the goal itself bothers me a bit. Innovation is a sign of a good process, but setting innovation as the goal for the product seems wrong to me.

QuoteExpanding on the previous paragraph, common wisdom says that d20 is great for fantasy and D&D stuff, but other genres?  Not so much.  Likewise, I don't think Traveller would be a very good sword & sorcery engine.

D20 is a weird tangent to get on because what makes D20 D20 is an open question. Hew close to the 3e model and it's terrible for supers. But Mutants and Masterminds changed a bit more and managed to do okay for itself.

QuoteI would guess that is at least part of the reason TSR didn't have one game to rule them all in the Elder Days.  What works for Gamma World doesn't necessarily work for Star Frontiers, and neither would be particularly well served with the MSH or D&D rules, even though Gamma World was very similar to D&D

If I had a game company I might repurpose chunks at a time rather than whole games. There's something to be said for not reinventing the wheel, especially in terms of efficiency. Otherwise I agree that some aspects need drastic change depending on genre.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;582105I don't see why they shouldn't be compared. They've very different things, of course, so you can only compare them using certain frames of reference. Asking "which is faster" or "which is more detailed" in a comparison between FUDGE and HERO is going to unfairly pick which is better, but you might still be able to judge them by which is better engineered - what skill went into building the mechanics and how advanced the design is in general.

I was going along with the whole tiers discussion and overall quality thing. Individual qualities can normally be compared just fine, with exceptions.
 

QuoteThis may be a different definition of "design" to what some of the other people in the thread are using - I'm looking not at if a thing does its job but how amazing it is. i.e. by way of example - using this definition a space shuttle that works 95% of the time is "better designed" than a glove that works 100% of the time, since although the glove meets its design objectives better, those objectives were much easier to reach).

Again, design for me is just the process. A spaceship and the process it took to get there are more impressive than a glove, but if your hands are cold and you've got a twenty in your pocket which are you looking for?

This is why I think (subjective) fun and (sometimes based on external factors like price) popularity are poor measures of the design process, even if for some purposes they can be good measurements for the final product.
 

QuoteA compromise type design is not necessarily better if its not that good at anything (though it might be popular, since everyone may be able to handle it). I just think that the system that does more things well is an example of a system that would show good design work, since its harder to build. Also - this thread has been fairly good, but usually people argue about what systems suck because they all have different priorities as to what makes a system good (speed, realism, flexibility, whatever).

Compromise doesn't have to not be good at anything. If we see realism and speed as at odds, a game that does 100/0 or 0/100 would appeal to a niche audience only. Huge crippling factor for a multiplayer game. It's entirely possible that a 30/30 might succeed by just being "good enough" for way more people, and that's before we get into possibly really efficient procedures that can bring it up to 80/80. I think the 80/80 will typically both be better designed and bring a bigger audiences (isolating for everything else, since system probably has a small impact on purchases compared with other factors). Mostly because I think the 0/100's 0 will become a problem more than the difference between 80 and 100 will.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582237I didn't name any game as a comparison to a master. I think the hobby needs a few hundred years before any such claim could be made. We're still in the stone age, if we're going to stretch this metaphor razor-thin. Actually, I don't think the metaphor extends as far as "masters", because RPGs are not art. The point was obviously about degrees of objective and subjective criticism, not claiming that a Davinci of RPGs exists.

Fuck it; I'll talk about the apprenticeship system.

The masters were masters because they first mastered the styles and techniques of their masters (so yes, they were copying someone), and then they developed their own. Somewhere down the line, people started painting better than Giotto, but he still gets credit for a lot of the theory behind composition all the way up until today. Kind of like how Darwin gets credit for evolution even though he didn't know as much about it back then as we do today.

There really won't be any masters of RPG design. Probably ever. Almost all designers so far were self-taught AFAIK.

Quote from: beejazz;582257Fuck it; I'll talk about the apprenticeship system.

The masters were masters because they first mastered the styles and techniques of their masters (so yes, they were copying someone), and then they developed their own. Somewhere down the line, people started painting better than Giotto, but he still gets credit for a lot of the theory behind composition all the way up until today. Kind of like how Darwin gets credit for evolution even though he didn't know as much about it back then as we do today.

There really won't be any masters of RPG design. Probably ever. Almost all designers so far were self-taught AFAIK.

Huh, when you said you were going to talk about the apprenticeship system, I thought you meant as it applies to artists, and how many of the works considered done by, say , "Michaelangelo", were actually painted by his team of apprentices under his direction. But you seem to be confusing the general term "master" with the vocational degree "master" (it really falls apart when one starts considering self-taught masters like Van Gogh), and your analogy to Darwin is simply baffling. In short, I have no idea what you're trying to say, other than I don't think it has anything to do with what I said.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582261Huh, when you said you were going to talk about the apprenticeship system, I thought you meant as it applies to artists, and how many of the works considered done by, say , "Michaelangelo", were actually painted by his team of apprentices under his direction. But you seem to be confusing the general term "master" with the vocational degree "master" (it really falls apart when one starts considering self-taught masters like Van Gogh), and your analogy to Darwin is simply baffling. In short, I have no idea what you're trying to say, other than I don't think it has anything to do with what I said.

I was maybe confusing a few points. I'm in a couple of places at the moment so sorry about that.

Earlier someone (catelf I think) asked if the masters copied from someone. They did. That's how they got to be masters. And their apprentices copied and worked for them hoping to attain a similar level of advancement. It wasn't addressed to you in particular. It was at that dumb "who says they didn't copy anyone?" comment.

In general, the purpose of the system was to expand what knowledge existed and was available. Later artists could produce better work, but that was kind of the point. Science works on a different model for a similar reason. I mentioned (long long ago) that art was treated almost similarly to technology, in that professional artists weren't just tasked with making art but with developing new processes for making art (which would sometimes be jealously guarded and sometimes shared for the benefit of all).

The concept of a "master" isn't a great fit for RPGs because literally everything is informal. There is no system in place for training designers to some minimum degree of competency. There are very few records of the processes designers used to arrive at the products they made. There is very little useful critical discourse about the final products. Proficiency is possible, but mastery seems very unlikely to happen, if we're talking about "masters" in this context.

In short, I was agreeing that we're a long way off from having masters.

The fundamental problem with sweeping aesthetic judgements is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The desire for something notably different from Game X might more helpfully be treated as presenting a new design problem, with explicitly stated goals, than approached with subjective and vague notions of "better".

It may also be more helpful to talk about "goodness" in the process.

I have in mind, for instance, blind-testing a prototype as close as possible to what one expects the finished product to be. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes.